On this day in physics: 30 January 1991, we said Goodbye to John Bardeen, an American Physicist and Electrical Engineer. John so far is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize TWICE! The first time he won in 1956 with two others for the invention of the transistor. As if once wasn't enough, the next time he won again with colleagues in 1972 for the development BCS theory, which is a theory which describes superconductivity and breaks it down into a property which exists at the microscopic scale. [Source]. PWN Physics 365 salutes you!
Word of the Day: Momentum- It would be hard to do a word of the day about mass and inertia and not follow it up with momentum. As if mass and inertia weren't hard enough to describe, I think momentum is even harder. This is what momentum is. It is the product of the velocity and the mass of an object. If you are stationary your momentum is zero. The faster you're going, the more momentum you gain. There is also something called conservation of momentum, which means that the total momentum of a system must be conserved. This is very important for collisions! If two bodies collide, the total momentum of the system will be conserved, which means that one body could leave the collision with a much higher velocity than it entered! This is especially the case when a small object moving slowly collides with a massive object moving quickly!
Killer Resource: Conservation of Momentum- Newton's Cradle Explained.
Keywords: Momentum, Newton, Cradle, Transistor, Superconductor.
